One reason school dress codes are such a lighting rod is that they often have no basis in real-world sartorial standards. Though some rules are common sense, people seem most irked by prohibitions on clothing that wouldn’t be out of place in a business meeting—yet is unacceptable by middle-school standards.

Recently we asked what the strangest dress code was at your school. Dozens of you wrote in, and here are the 11 we deemed most odd:

No holes in jeans, but duct tape is fine:

“This was at a public high school in West Virginia in the mid-2000s—the time just before leggings and yoga pants, which was a dress-code battle after I graduated. The fad at the time was holes in the jeans. The rule shifted every year, from no holes at all to only ones allowed below the knee. The kicker was if you were caught with in appropriate rips or tears in your $50 Hollister jeans, you had to put duct tape over them. Our principal carried a roll of tape with her just in case.

The strangest part was the rule was established because it “looked bad.” But then we were forced to wear duct tape, which makes you look even worse. And of course, this rule completely targeted girls because few boys wore holes in their jeans. The duct tape also ruined the tears, created even bigger holes once the tape was removed. It was bizarre and embarrassing.”

-- Taylor Stuck

No little old Russian grandmas:

“I attended a public high school in rural Ohio from 1998 to 2002. It was the only high school in the entire county, and despite the lack of any real problems (save the occasional student caught with a joint), the teachers and leadership felt it necessary to institute an oppressive dress code. At least once a week, the principal would announce via intercom a new standard. Below are some of my favorites:

NO babushkas (meaning headscarves). As far as I know, we did not have any older Russian ladies attending my high school. To reiterate, the principal announced over the intercom that “babushkas” (not scarves, not hijabs) were banned from the high school.

NO clothes making fun of the president. At the time, George W. Bush was in office. I actually contacted the ACLU on this one, who immediately sent my high school a cease-and-desist letter. They re-instituted the ban the year after I graduated.

NO face paint. Admittedly not very weird, but I got called into the principal's office, where he accused me of wearing white face paint. I am incredibly pale and had to show him my ivory-colored Maybelline foundation as proof.”

-- Anonymous

No cornrows, except in February:

“I went to Loyola High School in Los Angeles, graduating 2005. Since we were in Southern California, the dress code wasn’t really as strict as you might expect at a traditional all-boys prep school, but there were definitely rules.The strangest one was that cornrows were banned EXCEPT during Black History Month.” (Update: A reader who says he went to Loyola disputes this. The high school’s current official dress code doesn’t mention cornrows. Update: Another former student stands behind the claim:

@mimbsy@TheAtlantic I absolutely remember this because I had a giant afro my senior year because we couldn't have cornrows. Except in Feb.

“I attended public high school in a suburb of Harrisburg, PA, in the early to mid 1990s. Our school had a rule that you could not wear shorts after September 15 or before May 15.

Our school also did not have air conditioning. Harrisburg could be oppressively hot and humid well into September and May was often pretty warm too. The rules allowed girls to wear skirts over the knees and culottes whenever they wanted. This led to the yearly tradition of some boys, protesting the rule, wearing skirts to school on the first day over 80 degrees in May and being sent home to change.”

-- Andy Szekely

No mismatched shoes:

“A school in Kentucky where I used to work as a teacher (within the past few years) had many of the standard dress code rules. The one that always stood out, and got the most questions from students when we reviewed the dress code, was that you were required to wear shoes that were of the same style and color. I don’t recall it ever being an issue, but it was never revised or taken out.”

-- Ryan Bringhurst

Sweatshirts were fine, but no hoodies, unless you’re a monk:

“At my Catholic high school in rural Illinois in the early 2000s (long before they had taken on any racial-political connotation), hoodies were banned. The monks, when pressed to answer why the addition of a hood to a sweatshirt caused it to fall outside of the dress code, the students were informed that we could easily hide contraband in the hood. (An idea I hadn’t even though of, so thanks for the tip.) The most infuriating part about this rule is that every single monk wore a habit with a hood.”

-- Anonymous

Dangerous liaisons:

“Girls could not wear the combination of red and black because the girls counselor thought it was too sexy.”

-- Anonymous

No hair clips:

“I went to Catholic school during the ‘80s. Eighth-grade girls were not allowed to wear pantyhose, even for warmth under their knee socks in a Massachusetts winter. But in ninth grade, girls had to wear pantyhose and were not allowed to wear socks, though little ankle socks were very much in style.

Also in style were banana clips—long, curved hair clips that we were forbidden to wear. After the girls repeatedly pressed for an answer as to why these were verboten, we were told that banana clips simulated Mohawks and were therefore insulting to Native Americans.”

-- Kathleen Weldon

Na, na, ya grill:

“I went to a public high school in Midland, Texas. In 2006, my school banned ‘grills,’ the mouth pieces popularized by the Nelly ft. Paul Wall classic, ‘Grillz.’”

-- Brianna Losoya

The third toe leads to lost productivity:

“A job, recently, where open-toed shoes could not expose more than two toes.”

-- Anonymous

Loosely defined Satan:

“In a large public school in the city: ‘No Satanic t-shirts.’ Just that. No explanation, just ‘No Satanic t-shirts.’”

Spring is here, heralding the emergence of that perennial warm-weather menace: the shoulders and lower femurs of teenagers. It’s only March, and students from Fresno to Baltimore are already protesting what they say are unfair and antiquated school dress codes. As Li reported last year, it’s often girls who feel singled out by these rules.

It’s not just students who are up in arms. A group of parents are suing a charter school in North Carolina because the school says girls must wear jumper dresses, skirts, or “skorts” each day.

Some school dress codes, granted, are nothing radical—they’re similar to what you’d encounter in an entry-level job. But others seem to drag far behind mainstream social norms. (Barring a sister-wife situation, in what other context would women not be allowed to wear pants?) Many school clothing rules seem puzzling because they’re so at odds with real-world business attire.

Here’s my personal head-scratcher: I started high school, in McKinney, Texas, right after Columbine. One of the Columbine shooters was wearing black during the attack. Therefore, in my public high school, we were not allowed to wear all black. That meant no black blouses with black skirts, no little black dresses, no black dress shirts with black slacks. There had to be at least one colorful element. This was, fortunately, during a preppier era, but suffice it to say my current look would not comply.

Below are some Atlantic staffers’ most perplexing dress-code rules. We invite readers to submit their own. Please email hello@theatlantic.com, tell us the rule, the time and place (roughly, if you prefer), and whether the school was public or private. Please also let us know if we can use your name.

When I was a high-school sophomore, my school—Punahou (alma mater of none other than Barry Obama)—did something dramatic: It enacted a dress code. This was probably for the better. It was 2005; Abercrombie & Fitch and its barely-there denim shorts and mini skirts were all the rage. It was also Hawaii, where people in general just don't like the idea of clothing. (When I was a freshman, I remember the popular senior girls dressing up as lingerie-clad Victoria's Secret angels for Halloween. They came to school looking like this.)

The new dress code wasn't just any dress code. It was dubbed a “menu of options,” and allowed us to pick our attire from a pre-selected list of shirts and bottoms. Options included an assortment of relatively pricey American Apparel items (two types of T-shirts, a hideous skirt that awkwardly hit me mid-calf that I will remember forever, etc.) and official Punahou clothing (e.g., a club or team shirt or something like this gem from the campus bookstore). We could wear our own bottoms—as long as they came below the knee. For girls, that essentially meant we were limited to long pants, which in Hawaii’s 80-degree weather wasn’t always pleasant.

The school, I recently learned, has since done away with the menu of options. The rationale was to give students more choice, and by 2012 few students were buying options from the menu, anyway. The dress code “has somewhat returned to a statement of values and guidelines,” the school's spokeswoman told me: “neat, clean, and appropriate.” A brief review of the revised policy suggests that it's pretty run-of-the-mill—and rather vague (excessive exposure of the torso, shoulders, or thighs is prohibited, as is clothing that's too tight). My favorite part of the policy? It specifies that footwear is required of all students—but that, yes, slippers (read: flip flops) are A-OK.

Julie Beck, mid-2000s:

Any tank tops we wore in high school had to have at least one-inch wide straps. Any skinnier straps were considered inappropriate or “distracting” (a category which also included hats and bandanas, flip-flops, and shorts & skirts shorter than “fingertip length.” Also gum.) The only time I can remember a tank top actually being distracting was when a boy in my tenth grade history class, after repeatedly yelling that the classroom was too hot, stood up, screamed, and ripped the sleeves off his t-shirt. He was not sent to the office, though.

Gillian White, earlyish 2000s:

I went to a Catholic co-ed high school where the dress code got progressively stricter during my attendance. For the first three years we had a flexible measurement system for uniform skirts, something to the tune of no higher than 3" above the knee, or no shorter than fingertips extended downward (no skirt rolling). At the start of my senior year, the administration implemented a new rule: All girls (of all heights) must wear skirts that are at least 19" in length.

It was a mess. The first day of senior year, all girls had their skirts measured with paper rulers during class. Those who didn’t meet the mark were sent down to the Discipline office so their parents could be called, skirt hems could be adjusted, or detentions could be doled out. I got pulled out of an AP History class, I believe. By the time I got downstairs there was such a large number of young women in violation of the rule that we were directed to sit in the gym on the bleachers while we waited to be reprimanded. I missed at an hour and a half of class that day, while gym classes came in and gawked at the rule breakers. Not going to lie, it felt kind of slut-shame-y.

A local paper caught wind of the whole debacle and wrote about how ridiculous it was, noting that there were teachers at the school whose skirts surely didn't pass the 19" rule. The school relaxed a bit after that, and have abandoned the skirt measuring. But it was a pretty gross moment. I don't remember any other dress code rule that so clearly singled out one group, disrupted their school day, and then put them on display for censure.

Anonymous, 1996-2000:

My all-girls school required us to wear kilts. We could wear tights or even sweat pants under our skirts, but I was always jealous of our rival school, where the girls were allowed to wear kilts or corduroys.

Lenika Cruz, early-2000s:

At a few [private] schools I went to between middle school and high school, super low-cut socks were the thing to do. So people would pull their socks so that the extra material bunched around their toes and tuck it under their feet inside their shoes. Sometimes if your socks were too low, the teacher would make you take off your shoes and there'd be several inches of unused sock just dangling there.

As winters grow warmer in North America, thirsty ticks are on the move.

We found the moose calf half an hour in. He lay atop thin snow on a gentle slope sheltered by the boughs of a big, black spruce, curled up as a dog would on a couch. He had turned his long, gaunt head to rest against his side and closed his eyes. He might have been sleeping. The day before, April 17, 2018, when the GPS tracker on the moose’s collar stopped moving for six hours, this stillness had caused both an email and a text to alert Jake Debow, a Vermont state field biologist who stood next to me now with Josh Blouin, another state biologist, that moose No. 75 had either shucked his collar or died.

“You want pictures before we start?” Debow asked me. He’s the senior of the two young biologists, both still in grad school, both in their late 20s, young and strong and funny, from families long in the north country, both drawn to the job by a love of hunting and being outside. Debow had always wanted to be a game warden; in college, he “fell in love with the science.” His Vermont roots go back 10 generations. “Jake Debow,” Josh told me, “is about as Vermont as you can get.” It was Debow’s second season on the moose project, and Blouin’s first. This was the sixth calf, of 30 collared, that they’d found sucked to death by ticks this season. They were here to necropsy the carcass, send the tissues to a veterinary pathology lab in New Hampshire, and try to figure out as much as possible about how and why these calves were dying.

For several months, Cara has been working up the courage to approach her mom about what she saw on Instagram. Not long ago, the 11-year-old—who, like all the other kids in this story, is referred to by a pseudonym—discovered that her mom had been posting photos of her, without prior approval, for much of her life. “I’ve wanted to bring it up. It’s weird seeing myself up there, and sometimes there’s pics I don’t like of myself,” she said.

Like most other modern kids, Cara grew up immersed in social media. Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube were all founded before she was born; Instagram has been around since she was a toddler. While many kids may not yet have accounts themselves, their parents, schools, sports teams, and organizations have been curating an online presence for them since birth. The shock of realizing that details about your life—or, in some cases, an entire narrative of it—have been shared online without your consent or knowledge has become a pivotal experience in the lives of many young teens and tweens.

A significant minority seldom or never meet people from another race, and they prize sameness, not difference.

Most Americans do not live in a totalizing bubble. They regularly encounter people of different races, ideologies, and religions. For the most part, they view these interactions as positive, or at least neutral.

Yet according to a new study by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) and The Atlantic, a significant minority of Americans do not live this way. They seldom or never meet people of another race. They dislike interacting with people who don’t share their political beliefs. And when they imagine the life they want for their children, they prize sameness, not difference. Education and geography seemed to make a big difference in how people think about these issues, and in some cases, so did age.

The Bulwark is on a mission to name and shame President Trump's most high-status supporters.

Charlie Sykes is sitting behind a desk in a sparse, disheveled office—blank walls lined with empty filing cabinets, windows covered with crooked blinds—as he tries to conjure the perfect metaphor for The Bulwark, the anti-Trump conservative news site he recently helped start.

“We are the ultimate wilderness!” he declares to me.

But that doesn’t sound quite lonely enough for the political niche they’re occupying, so he tries again: “We’re on a desert island.”

Sykes continues to riff like this in his chirpy, midwestern accent, comparing The Bulwark’s writers to a band of “Somali pirates,” and then to a contingent of “guerrilla fighters.” He’s so enthusiastic about the exercise that before long I am tossing out my own overwrought suggestions. Perhaps, I muse at one point, they are soldiers on the final front of the Republican Civil War—making one last stand before the forces of Trumpism complete their conquest.

I was one of many people who found Jussie Smollett’s story a little off from the beginning. Two white men in ski masks are out in 10-degree weather in the middle of the night, equipped with a bottle of bleach or something like it and a rope that they fashioned into a mock noose. These thugs, who shouted Trump slogans as well as racist and homophobic slurs, seemed to know who Smollett was on sight, meaning they were aficionados of the splashy black soap opera Empire, on which Smollett is a main character. Somehow they were aware that Smollett, prominent but hardly on the A-list as celebrities go, was gay.

Yes, my skepticism made me feel a little guilty. We are justly sensitized to violence against people for being black and for being gay in the wake of incidents I need not name. We are also just past watching legions of people who should have known better refuse to credit Christine Blasey Ford’s accusation against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Maybe fear and trauma distorted Smollett’s memory somewhat? Maybe the media were getting some of the details wrong? Wait and see, I and others thought.

How do you offer intelligence to a president who’s not interested—and keep your job?

Dan Coats was nervous. Ahead of his very first threat briefing to Congress nearly two years ago, he was having trouble keeping straight what he could say in the unclassified part and what he had to save for the classified portion. He had retired from the Senate just months before—now he’d been thrust into an entirely different kind of job as the director of national intelligence. In the words of one former colleague, who requested anonymity to speak candidly, he was a “fish out of water,” horrified that he might get something wrong.

What he wasn’t worried about, this person said, was the kind of conflict with the president that erupted after his most recent threat briefing this past January, when he and other intelligence officials gave testimony on issues like North Korea, Iran, and Russia that contradicted statements Trump has made. Trump’s lingering anger about that testimony, ahead of his upcoming North Korea summit, has now revived speculation that Trump might fire Coats. But what Coats wanted to do two years ago, and by many accounts has faithfully tried to do since, was represent the views of the intelligence community to a president not always inclined to hear them. That is at once the key requirement of his job and potentially the one that puts him in the most peril.

As Dating Around follows New Yorkers on Groundhog Day–like blind dates, viewers may begin to lose their grip on reality.

Television has treated dating like a game since, well, The Dating Game. Each generation finds an era-appropriate kind of competitive romance. The game shows of 20th-century networks presented the hunt for love as communal, lighthearted, and blessedly straightforward. For the aughts, reality TV made sport of anxiety-producing cultural pressures—courtship is not only battling for the best mate, but also battling to live the great Stepford dream!—via dental hygienists in swimsuits and ex–football players named Colton.

Now it’s apps like Tinder that have gamified romance. But rather than contend in a cheesy quiz show or an overproduced melodrama, singles chase dopamine as they would in addictive video games. This is what Netflix’s refreshing and distressing new show Dating Around nails—both in what it portrays, and in the viewing experience. An elegantly shot entry in a mayhem-filled TV tradition, it might lead watchers of a certain age to yelp “Next!” at their screens. Yet it also extends a headier pop-culture fascination: the suspicion that we live in a simulation. If Dating Around has an eerie tinge of Black Mirror or Westworld or Russian Doll, so too does modern dating.

It’s like the flu: uncomfortable, occasionally deadly, but constantly with us.

Growing up, I used to think anti-Semitism was like the black death: tragic, nightmarish, and historic. It had wiped out millions of people. It was theoretically terrifying. But only occasional outbreaks in poor and faraway countries remained. It had ruined the life of my grandmother, but it would not be part of mine.

But now I realize that anti-Semitism is actually like the flu: uncomfortable, sickly, occasionally deadly, but constantly with us. Every few decades, it mutates into an epidemic. The rest of the time it lingers, producing headaches, sweats, and dizzy spells. Not killing us, just wearing us down.

As a British Jew, with dual French citizenship and Jewish family in Paris, I have felt the cold now for some time; I’m trying to remember when I first felt it coming on. Was it when the Labour splitter George Galloway was elected as a member of Parliament in East London on the back of an anti-Semitic campaign in 2005? Or was it when Ilan Halimi was abducted and murdered by anti-Semites in Paris in 2006?

In caves and labyrinths, humans’ cerebral navigation equipment is mostly useless. That can spark panic or free the mind.

On the evening of December 18, 2004, in the hamlet of Madiran, in southwestern France, a man named Jean-Luc Josuat-Vergès wandered into the tunnels of an abandoned mushroom farm and got lost. Josuat-Vergès, who was 48 and employed as a caretaker at a local health center, had been depressed. Leaving his wife and 14-year-old son at home, he’d driven up into the hills with a bottle of whiskey and a pocketful of sleeping pills. After steering his Land Rover into the large entrance tunnel of the mushroom farm, he’d clicked on his flashlight and stumbled into the dark.

The tunnels, which had been originally dug out of the limestone hills as a chalk mine, comprised a five-mile-long labyrinth of blind corridors, twisting passages, and dead ends. Josuat-Vergès walked down one corridor, turned, then turned again. His flashlight battery slowly dimmed, then died; shortly after, as he tromped down one soggy corridor, his shoes were sucked off his feet and swallowed by the mud. Josuat-Vergès stumbled barefoot through the maze, groping in pitch-darkness, searching in vain for the exit.

He’s challenging American exceptionalism in a far more radical way than his 2020 competitors are.

The conventional wisdom is that Bernie Sanders is a victim of his own success. His “populist agenda has helped push the party to the left,” declaredThe New York Times in its story about his presidential announcement. But in 2020, he may lose “ground to newer faces who have adopted many of his ideas.”

There’s an obvious truth here: From a $15 national minimum wage to Medicare for all to free college tuition, Sanders’s opponents have embraced policies that were considered radical when he first proposed them during the 2016 campaign. But what the Times misses is that there’s another policy realm where Sanders may find it easier to carve out a distinctly lefty niche: America’s relationship to the rest of the world.

As winters grow warmer in North America, thirsty ticks are on the move.

We found the moose calf half an hour in. He lay atop thin snow on a gentle slope sheltered by the boughs of a big, black spruce, curled up as a dog would on a couch. He had turned his long, gaunt head to rest against his side and closed his eyes. He might have been sleeping. The day before, April 17, 2018, when the GPS tracker on the moose’s collar stopped moving for six hours, this stillness had caused both an email and a text to alert Jake Debow, a Vermont state field biologist who stood next to me now with Josh Blouin, another state biologist, that moose No. 75 had either shucked his collar or died.

“You want pictures before we start?” Debow asked me. He’s the senior of the two young biologists, both still in grad school, both in their late 20s, young and strong and funny, from families long in the north country, both drawn to the job by a love of hunting and being outside. Debow had always wanted to be a game warden; in college, he “fell in love with the science.” His Vermont roots go back 10 generations. “Jake Debow,” Josh told me, “is about as Vermont as you can get.” It was Debow’s second season on the moose project, and Blouin’s first. This was the sixth calf, of 30 collared, that they’d found sucked to death by ticks this season. They were here to necropsy the carcass, send the tissues to a veterinary pathology lab in New Hampshire, and try to figure out as much as possible about how and why these calves were dying.

For several months, Cara has been working up the courage to approach her mom about what she saw on Instagram. Not long ago, the 11-year-old—who, like all the other kids in this story, is referred to by a pseudonym—discovered that her mom had been posting photos of her, without prior approval, for much of her life. “I’ve wanted to bring it up. It’s weird seeing myself up there, and sometimes there’s pics I don’t like of myself,” she said.

Like most other modern kids, Cara grew up immersed in social media. Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube were all founded before she was born; Instagram has been around since she was a toddler. While many kids may not yet have accounts themselves, their parents, schools, sports teams, and organizations have been curating an online presence for them since birth. The shock of realizing that details about your life—or, in some cases, an entire narrative of it—have been shared online without your consent or knowledge has become a pivotal experience in the lives of many young teens and tweens.

A significant minority seldom or never meet people from another race, and they prize sameness, not difference.

Most Americans do not live in a totalizing bubble. They regularly encounter people of different races, ideologies, and religions. For the most part, they view these interactions as positive, or at least neutral.

Yet according to a new study by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) and The Atlantic, a significant minority of Americans do not live this way. They seldom or never meet people of another race. They dislike interacting with people who don’t share their political beliefs. And when they imagine the life they want for their children, they prize sameness, not difference. Education and geography seemed to make a big difference in how people think about these issues, and in some cases, so did age.

The Bulwark is on a mission to name and shame President Trump's most high-status supporters.

Charlie Sykes is sitting behind a desk in a sparse, disheveled office—blank walls lined with empty filing cabinets, windows covered with crooked blinds—as he tries to conjure the perfect metaphor for The Bulwark, the anti-Trump conservative news site he recently helped start.

“We are the ultimate wilderness!” he declares to me.

But that doesn’t sound quite lonely enough for the political niche they’re occupying, so he tries again: “We’re on a desert island.”

Sykes continues to riff like this in his chirpy, midwestern accent, comparing The Bulwark’s writers to a band of “Somali pirates,” and then to a contingent of “guerrilla fighters.” He’s so enthusiastic about the exercise that before long I am tossing out my own overwrought suggestions. Perhaps, I muse at one point, they are soldiers on the final front of the Republican Civil War—making one last stand before the forces of Trumpism complete their conquest.

I was one of many people who found Jussie Smollett’s story a little off from the beginning. Two white men in ski masks are out in 10-degree weather in the middle of the night, equipped with a bottle of bleach or something like it and a rope that they fashioned into a mock noose. These thugs, who shouted Trump slogans as well as racist and homophobic slurs, seemed to know who Smollett was on sight, meaning they were aficionados of the splashy black soap opera Empire, on which Smollett is a main character. Somehow they were aware that Smollett, prominent but hardly on the A-list as celebrities go, was gay.

Yes, my skepticism made me feel a little guilty. We are justly sensitized to violence against people for being black and for being gay in the wake of incidents I need not name. We are also just past watching legions of people who should have known better refuse to credit Christine Blasey Ford’s accusation against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Maybe fear and trauma distorted Smollett’s memory somewhat? Maybe the media were getting some of the details wrong? Wait and see, I and others thought.

How do you offer intelligence to a president who’s not interested—and keep your job?

Dan Coats was nervous. Ahead of his very first threat briefing to Congress nearly two years ago, he was having trouble keeping straight what he could say in the unclassified part and what he had to save for the classified portion. He had retired from the Senate just months before—now he’d been thrust into an entirely different kind of job as the director of national intelligence. In the words of one former colleague, who requested anonymity to speak candidly, he was a “fish out of water,” horrified that he might get something wrong.

What he wasn’t worried about, this person said, was the kind of conflict with the president that erupted after his most recent threat briefing this past January, when he and other intelligence officials gave testimony on issues like North Korea, Iran, and Russia that contradicted statements Trump has made. Trump’s lingering anger about that testimony, ahead of his upcoming North Korea summit, has now revived speculation that Trump might fire Coats. But what Coats wanted to do two years ago, and by many accounts has faithfully tried to do since, was represent the views of the intelligence community to a president not always inclined to hear them. That is at once the key requirement of his job and potentially the one that puts him in the most peril.

As Dating Around follows New Yorkers on Groundhog Day–like blind dates, viewers may begin to lose their grip on reality.

Television has treated dating like a game since, well, The Dating Game. Each generation finds an era-appropriate kind of competitive romance. The game shows of 20th-century networks presented the hunt for love as communal, lighthearted, and blessedly straightforward. For the aughts, reality TV made sport of anxiety-producing cultural pressures—courtship is not only battling for the best mate, but also battling to live the great Stepford dream!—via dental hygienists in swimsuits and ex–football players named Colton.

Now it’s apps like Tinder that have gamified romance. But rather than contend in a cheesy quiz show or an overproduced melodrama, singles chase dopamine as they would in addictive video games. This is what Netflix’s refreshing and distressing new show Dating Around nails—both in what it portrays, and in the viewing experience. An elegantly shot entry in a mayhem-filled TV tradition, it might lead watchers of a certain age to yelp “Next!” at their screens. Yet it also extends a headier pop-culture fascination: the suspicion that we live in a simulation. If Dating Around has an eerie tinge of Black Mirror or Westworld or Russian Doll, so too does modern dating.

It’s like the flu: uncomfortable, occasionally deadly, but constantly with us.

Growing up, I used to think anti-Semitism was like the black death: tragic, nightmarish, and historic. It had wiped out millions of people. It was theoretically terrifying. But only occasional outbreaks in poor and faraway countries remained. It had ruined the life of my grandmother, but it would not be part of mine.

But now I realize that anti-Semitism is actually like the flu: uncomfortable, sickly, occasionally deadly, but constantly with us. Every few decades, it mutates into an epidemic. The rest of the time it lingers, producing headaches, sweats, and dizzy spells. Not killing us, just wearing us down.

As a British Jew, with dual French citizenship and Jewish family in Paris, I have felt the cold now for some time; I’m trying to remember when I first felt it coming on. Was it when the Labour splitter George Galloway was elected as a member of Parliament in East London on the back of an anti-Semitic campaign in 2005? Or was it when Ilan Halimi was abducted and murdered by anti-Semites in Paris in 2006?

In caves and labyrinths, humans’ cerebral navigation equipment is mostly useless. That can spark panic or free the mind.

On the evening of December 18, 2004, in the hamlet of Madiran, in southwestern France, a man named Jean-Luc Josuat-Vergès wandered into the tunnels of an abandoned mushroom farm and got lost. Josuat-Vergès, who was 48 and employed as a caretaker at a local health center, had been depressed. Leaving his wife and 14-year-old son at home, he’d driven up into the hills with a bottle of whiskey and a pocketful of sleeping pills. After steering his Land Rover into the large entrance tunnel of the mushroom farm, he’d clicked on his flashlight and stumbled into the dark.

The tunnels, which had been originally dug out of the limestone hills as a chalk mine, comprised a five-mile-long labyrinth of blind corridors, twisting passages, and dead ends. Josuat-Vergès walked down one corridor, turned, then turned again. His flashlight battery slowly dimmed, then died; shortly after, as he tromped down one soggy corridor, his shoes were sucked off his feet and swallowed by the mud. Josuat-Vergès stumbled barefoot through the maze, groping in pitch-darkness, searching in vain for the exit.

He’s challenging American exceptionalism in a far more radical way than his 2020 competitors are.

The conventional wisdom is that Bernie Sanders is a victim of his own success. His “populist agenda has helped push the party to the left,” declaredThe New York Times in its story about his presidential announcement. But in 2020, he may lose “ground to newer faces who have adopted many of his ideas.”

There’s an obvious truth here: From a $15 national minimum wage to Medicare for all to free college tuition, Sanders’s opponents have embraced policies that were considered radical when he first proposed them during the 2016 campaign. But what the Times misses is that there’s another policy realm where Sanders may find it easier to carve out a distinctly lefty niche: America’s relationship to the rest of the world.